Study of intensity within the prosody framework of the Canaries

Abstract

This work aims at determining the importance of intensity within the research framework of Canarian prosody, by taking into account an acoustic and statistical study from a corpus of 648 sentences uttered in a formal speech style by Canarian informants from two diatopically opposed islands: El Hierro, which belongs to the western region of the Canarian Archipelago, and Fuerteventura, which belongs to the eastern region. With the obtained acoustic results, we have labelled the tonic vowels according to their intensity, by taking into account a differential threshold of 4 dB, which has been recently determined in a perceptive-type study (Dorta, Martín Gómez and Jorge Trujillo, in press). Furthermore, a statistical analysis has been carried out in R (R Core Team, 2015) and ULLRToolbox (Hernández-Cabrera, 2012). From the acoustic results obtained, the amplitude of the accentuated is found to be higher in the following circumstances: in the nuclear accent, the acute accent and the plain accent, the contrast tonic/ post-tonic, the declarative modality and pertaining to Fuerteventura. From the statistical results we highlight the importance of the contrast tonic/ post-tonic in the SPrep, which reflects the acoustically registered final descent in intensity